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Sunday, June 01, 2014

Influential Railway TV 1: Locomotion

What TV shows did you watch growing up? I had the usual diet of Mr. Dressup, Sharon, Lois and Bram and Sesame Street but, even when I was very young, I was particularly drawn to the small collection of railway VHS tapes at my local library (Barney really didn't work for me, although Thomas the Tank Engine
did!). What amazes me looking back is how influential those tapes were
in the development of my interest in railways. At the time, I mainly saw
pretty pictures of trains, but the underlying content was also seeping
in. As I got older, more information and connections were made with each
viewing as I kept being drawn back to the same ones. In this series of articles, I revisit and analyze the railway shows which have had the greatest influence on my study of railways. I was avidly
watching many of them before I turned six.

Locomotion (1993)

In
my opinion, this A&E/BBC series is the most informative and
best-produced series of railway documentaries ever made. The four
episodes brought together archive footage, interviews and a coherent
narrative of railway history from a socio-economic perspective. The
episodes detailed the history of American railroads; the enormous impact
of the railways on Britain; the railways' role in turning cavalry-based
fighting into modern mechanised warfare (I admit, I couldn't watch this
episode until my teenage years); and the future of railways around the
world.

The American railroads, chronicled in Engines of Enterprise,
is the most economic of the episodes. It charts the construction of
railroads across the continent, the opulence of Pullman and the Robber
Barons and the slow decline brought on by regulation, trucks and
aircraft. One of the advantages of Locomotion was that many
people who were adults in the first half of the 20th century were still
alive when it was filmed. This allowed first-hand accounts from pre-WWII
union organisers and railway employees, which added a fascinating
personal layer to the story.

While the economic narrative of railroads
is the standard for American railroad history, this episode wove it into
the broader social changes in the United States, making for a very
interesting account. My one criticism was the decision to end the
episode with the decline of streamliners in the 1950s. This meant
leaving out mergers, bankruptcies, Conrail, deregulation and the
resurgence in freight traffic (which had begun when the episode was
made).

The second episode, Taming the Iron Monster,
has always been my favourite and has shaped much of my historical
study. Even when I was very young, the account of the early days of
railways in Britain appealed to me. While Engines of Enterprise
focused on economics, the British story focused on engineering,
architecture and people. By considering engineering, the documentary is
able to demonstrate how the north of England (through coal, terrain and
personalities) shaped the development of railways around the world
through being the test-bed for tunnels, bridges and locomotive designs.
Stations were the public face of the railways, and were designed to
exude confidence. Anyone who has visited a major railway station in the
UK (and even many of the smaller ones) will understand this point. I
suppose what appealed to me most was the discussion of people and how
they interacted with their landscape. Social reform and the trade union
movement were inextricably linked with the railways, as was an
increasingly mobile society.

However, I do think this episode was
overly-whiggish when it came to the battle for the Lake District, in
which the likes of John Ruskin managed to prevent railway construction
from destroying the countryside (in hindsight, cars have caused far more
damage than carefully-planned railways would have ever done).
Similarly, Ruskin et al. were far more concerned about hoipaloi being
able to access the Lakes than about the development of infrastructure.
This look at British railways concludes with the striking parallels
between early railway building (and its public reception) and the
Channel Tunnel, which was under construction when the show was filmed.
Just as early railways provoked a mania, the Channel Tunnel has provoked
a mania for high-speed rail in the UK, with HS1 absorbing the
London-Folkstone portion of the line and the controversial HS2 being
debated today.

I am a rather peaceful person and the
thought that my favourite mode of transportation could be a vehicle for
the evils of war is not something I wish to dwell on. Yet The War Machine
shows how railways took technological determinism to the extreme,
fuelling larger, more mechanised, longer wars through an almost
assembly-line-like movement of supplies, ammunition and people. By
focusing on three wars, the American Civil War, and the two World Wars,
the documentary shows how railway supply lines both expanded the scope of war
and isolated it. One of these instances, the documentary argued, was the
systematic extermination during the Shoah. Railways allowed for the
movement of millions of people efficiently, but also in such a
systematic way that few people even knew the whole picture. In this
sense, the Shoah was Fordist (perhaps appropriate since Ford was
anti-semitic) as each small part of the Nazi machine played its part in
the tragedy with little need for an understanding of the end result.
Although it is my least favourite episode, it discusses its subject well
and even spoke to Soviet railways workers and used Soviet footage (even
if the narration described it as "propaganda"). Railways in war is not
pleasant, and as such has been largely ignored outside the academic
sphere, but The War Machine is a good grounding for a general audience.

I always felt that the final episode, Magic Machines and Mobile People,
was a little out of place, not just because A&E clearly re-cut
it for an American audience (complete with several monologues from Jack
Perkins), but also because the content didn't fit well together. The
first portion, looking at the influence of railways on space and time,
has come to mean more to me as my interest of railways has moved towards
people's perception of railway technology and travel. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey
was still a new work at the time and a cultural interpretation of
railway history was a nascent area of study.

However, the show suddenly
jumps to Florida. Yes, Henry Flagler did essentially create the state as
a sun destination thanks to extensive railway investment, but it
doesn't fit neatly with space and time, even if Florida is arguably a
railway-created space. After the citrus state, we jump to Japan,
apparently the one place where rail is still in its golden age thanks to
punctual (perhaps too punctual?)
service and extremely fast trains.

The show ends with the warning that
railways, even in Japan, are usually money-losers, yet in a more crowded
and urban world they will remain critical to future transportation
infrastructure. This prediction has come true. As oil prices continue to
rise, almost every developed nation is investing in new trains, better
rail infrastructure and resurrecting long-abandoned lines. Sadly, Canada
remains an exception and its absence from the television series is
probably warranted.

My confusion about the incoherence of Magic Machines and Mobile People is explained in the credits, which hint that there were in fact two final episodes made, one for the BBC and one for A&E. I only noticed this recently, and was delighted to find Track to the Future, the real
ending to the show. Whereas the A&E version is like a bad
school essay, trying to cram lots of facts together and hoping that it
makes sense (note to self, don't do that), Track to the Future
presents a coherent analysis of a very simple question: what is the
future of rail? Rather than jumping around, the show used three case
studies, all suitably glum and postmodern, to show how rail in the early
'90s was dying.

While the case study on Japan is virtually identical to
the A&E version, the other two are not. The show begins looking
at the ruins of the Argentinian railway network, which was once one of
the greatest in the world. Decimated by cuts under nationalization, the
infrastructure collapsed, literally. Privatized in a last-ditch attempt
to rescue some lines, the network shed over 90% of its employees and
abandoned large swaths of the population who didn't live on arterial
routes. Since the show was filmed, Argentina has suffered crippling
economic crises and has now begun to re-nationalize some of its network
in order to save it for the future. The other case study looked at Los
Angeles' legendary gridlock, ironically the result of a highly popular
interurban railway network. Streetcars made the city's suburbs possible,
but then chained LA to cars when the tracks were ripped up. This is
perhaps the most optimistic case, however, because the city has begun to
rebuild its railway network (and continues to this day). Whereas Magic Machines and Mobile People was whimsical and nostalgic, Track to the Future was much more sober and demonstrated how railways will play a leading role in our future megacities.

Overall, Locomotion
is now dated in its views of private business and lingering anti-Soviet
feeling, but much of what it says remains incredibly relevant and
sparked my interest in the social impact of railways nearly two decades
ago. Locomotion was released as a 4-tape VHS set and has more
recently been issued as a Region 1 2-disc DVD set. Nicholas Faith, the
consultant for the series, wrote an accompanying book called Locomotion, which is definitely worth a read.

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Welcome!

I am an author, photographer and historian specializing in rail transportation, leisure and toys. This website is no longer updated, but remains as an archive. For updated content, please visit my academic website, Pro Bono History.

My photographs and articles, mostly on rail-related subjects, have appeared on three continents. I have published three books on Ontario railways and my fourth, Call of the Northland, was released in September 2014.